A Rose Named Survivor: An Unexpected Reflection on Aging, Reading, Resistance, and Community Support
Image credit: Jen Delos Reyes, 2013, Portland OR, International Rose Test Garden
It is Sunday morning. I have already been up since before 7am. I am looking at myself in the mirror, the gleaming light of the sunshine spilling into the all white bathroom. It magnifies the white hairs that are gathering around the dark corners of the long curtain of my hair. I lift up my bangs and expose the salty underbelly few get to see. I think about how when I was in high school I was so enamored with Susan Sontag that I went to Claire’s boutique at the mall and bought a clip in hair accessory—a shock of white hair I could clip into my own. Now that my own Sontag streak is settling into almost the exact place that my teenage self dreamed it would I hate to admit that my eyes welled up with tears as I thought about my aging body. It is OK to feel deeply. I remembered this passage from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider I had just read about how things can feel on a Sunday morning:
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—examining what those ideas feel like being lived on a Sunday morning at 7a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer old longings, battle old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
I continue to get ready for the day. I open the medicine cabinet. It was sparse when I arrived at the reading residency, one of the only items on the shelf was a bottle of beautiful handcrafted rose perfume. The perfume that I packed with me smells like dirt, literally. The name of the fragrance is Ancients, and the notes in the fragrance are described as moss, lichen, earth, an “ancient forest”. I wondered if I mixed the two scents together if I would smell like a real rose garden, not just the beautiful part, but the life giving root.
The cover of Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is a close up image of a beautiful bed of flowers. In the book she reveals that much of the book was written as she sat in a rose garden. Throughout the book Odell uses nature and ecology as models for our own resistance. One example she gives is that of old trees that have grown too large and are deemed “worthless” because the gnarled branches are no longer suitable as timber. She references “Old Survivor,” Oakland’s only remaining old-growth redwood left. Odell writes:
“(w)e could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal.”
At this point in writing this reflection my pen ran out of ink. As I packed for the reading residency I wondered if it was a bad idea to only bring one pen, but then I thought about the jar overstuffed with pens in my home and thought I would be fine. I had thought of myself as somewhat of a minimalist until I arrived here on Friday. I was so impressed by the elegant sparseness of the apartment I wondered if anyone really lived here at all? As I looked around for a pen I found nothing. I was about to give up until I noticed a single white pen carefully displayed on a shelf. The pen was emblazoned with the words, “I THREW AWAY THE ROSE.” It seemed like a sign. I realized this pen was most likely an art object, but I think it is important that art sometimes be useful.
I think a lot about the intersection of art and everyday life, I sometimes teach a class on it. In the class I encourage students to make work that emerges from their very existence. Part of that class is having students come up with their ideal daily schedule. For inspiration we look at examples of how artists and writers structure their own days. While reading Marlee Grace’s How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Radical Self-Care” I was reminded of how often I stray from my own daily ideal when I read the one that was included by contributor Jaqueline Suskin. I was struck by how maintenance (other than physical exercise) was not included in their daily ideal, or any of the examples I share in my class either. To quote one of my artist heroes Mierle Laderman Ukeles from her 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition ‘Care,'”“Maintenance is a drag. It takes all the fucking time. Literally.”
Residencies can provide a break from the act of daily maintenance. Even though this residency is housed in a domestic space I am still liberated from the demands of my own. The fact that this residency took place in a home is significant. Over the course of the weekend I read four books cover to cover, came up with new class assignments, re-adjusted my relationship to social media and technology, got clarity on a book project and came up with an outline and the title: Turning Up: Showing Up for Yourself, Each Other, and a World in Crisis. I was able to come to this clarity because a choice was made to make one’s private space a resource for their creative community. For those of us fortunate enough to have a place to live, this is a model that is replicable and adaptable.
In my own home when I read on Sundays I like to follow the sun as it comes through the windows and read in the bright warm places it creates. This weekend I had the luxury of finding the new sun spots. While I am only in a new neighborhood and not a new city, when I travel to a place I like to always be sure to make a contribution in some way to the local economy/ecology. I am leaving behind one of the books I brought with me as an offering to the Liminal Library and I am about to follow the sun outside to walk to the neighborhood bookstore to buy a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, and then go to a flower shop to buy a rose to leave in the apartment as a small and thematic act of gratitude.
Last month I was at a panel on “Alternate Visions & Counter Institutions” moderated by Courtney Reid-Eaton where she began the discussion by bringing in a bouquet of flowers and calling into the space the legacy of the 1912 Bread and Roses textile workers strike organized primarily by women. “We want bread and roses too" became the rallying cry of the movement and demanded that their full humanity be acknowledged and cared for. It reminds me of the title of Audre Lorde piece I quoted at the beginning of this reflection, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” In fact the bread and roses slogan came itself from a poem of the same name by James Oppenheim:
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.
For Lorde poetry is necessary for survival, it is not sterile word play but a revelatory distillation of experience...It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. I am grateful for the time and space that this reading residency dedicated to agents of social change has provided me with. I am leaving feeling grounded, nurtured, and ready to continue down the thorny rose lined path toward a more just world.
-Jen Delos Reyes
Chicago, IL
October 6, 2019